We’re supposed to be impressed because local Russian émigré Oleg Ivutin once lived in the old Soviet Union. Ivutin would have us believe he is authoritative enough to declare the United States is on the “fast track” to becoming the Soviet Union.

I don’t know which proves how utterly uninformed Ivutin is; his absurd comments before the Georgia Tea Party, as reported in the MDJ, or his woeful ignorance of American politics.

It sounds suspiciously like Ivutin is getting his political education from Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, and other far right radio conspiracy theorists.

Ivutin says the recent disclosures about domestic metadata spying by the National Security Agency means America is devolving into a Soviet-style “evil empire,” to quote Ronald Reagan. This fits neatly into the bogus tea party narrative that President Obama is a secret Commie.

“Obama’s argument for all this is always, ‘Well, I have this power, but we’re never going to use it. And time after time again he uses it, and whatever is going to happen after Obama we don’t know.”

Ivutin is evidently unaware of 9-11 and the powers President George W. Bush demanded in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in American history. Those powers were timidly handed over by Congress and have been in effect ever since.

We’re told the spying has prevented dozens of terrorist attacks. I guess we have to believe that, but blaming Obama for the scope and scale of NSA spying is nonsense.

Speaking of spying, the KGB, Ivutin says, encouraged Soviets to spy on one another. The FBI, Ivutin added without offering any proof, is doing the same thing through the non-profit group Infragard, which is actually designed to prevent cyber attacks, not report on what your neighbor is doing.

Ivutin bizarrely goes on to compare Soviet and U.S. prisons.

“In Russia, they were benefiting from slavery when they were putting people in jails. Here, private prisons make money off of prisoners. So when prisoners go to prison the prison owner gets money, part of that is profit.”

It’s called privatization, Oleg, a concept thoroughly embraced by conservatives like you who contend private industry can do most all things better than the government. It’s also a concept that has been disproved time and again. In fact, the privatized prison system is a national disgrace.

No talk Ivutin delivers would be complete without some old fashioned tea party Red-baiting:

“I look at John McCain and Hillary Clinton. I don’t see any differences on any issues,” Ivutin said. “These people should openly admit that ‘Yes, we’re socialists’... This is why the tea party movement, the Ron Paul movement, the liberty movements are so popular is because everybody understands it finally.”

Except the tea party isn’t popular anywhere but in far right strongholds like Cobb County, where Ivutin and his pals bask in each others’ glow. In the rest of America, only 8 percent of Republicans self identify as tea partiers, according to a January Rasmussen poll. As for Ron Paul, he finished fourth in the Georgia primary last year.

Having failed to make his central point, that the U.S.A. is the next U.S.S.R., Ivutin concluded with the usual hollow tea party talking points:

“(W)e tell … the (GOP) establishment, ‘Look, we go this far. You will split the party of the conservative movement if you go along with this.’ I will be perfectly OK with that…in the future someone will remember that this country was made up of ideals and people who were willing to stand by them, not people who were willing to, just for political conveniences, adjust to things.”

Ivutin doesn’t comprehend compromise – those “political conveniences” he speaks of – is a founding principle of the Republic. Americans understand, contrary to the tea party and Soviet dogmas, nobody gets everything they want all the time in American politics.

Guido has adequately illustrated that a good Christian can hate our president for his politics, and his religion. Congrats Guido, you have descended to a new low. It is Christians like Guido who give Christianity a bad name.

Now that George Zimmerman has been acquitted by a Florida jury for stalking, shooting and killing 17-year-old, unarmed Trayvon Martin, let’s turn to conservative media thought leaders for a sensitive and serious discussion on how we can ease the resulting racial tensions and begin the healing process.

Rush, you’re the voice of the modern conservative movement, so why don’t you start us off:

"I can now" say "’nigga' with an ‘a’" because "it's not racist.” A caller used the same slur and Rush warned him "not to try it on the street.”

How about the National Rifle Association’s deep thinker, board member and aging rocker Ted Nugent?

African-Americans can solve “the black problem” if they put their “heart and soul into being law-abiding...”

What say you, Bill-o?

The 104-year-old civil rights organization, the NAACP, is a "the grievance industry."

Laura Ingraham always has something inclusive and constructive to say:

Civil rights leaders are "hustlers and pimps who make a living off inflaming racial tensions."

Maybe former White House spokeswoman Dana Perino has something cogent and cohesive to add:

Liberals are "angry at Hispanics" after the verdict.

How about the man with the porn actor mustache, Geraldo Rivera?

The Zimmerman jurors "would have shot and killed Trayvon Martin a lot sooner than George Zimmerman did…You dress like a thug, people are going to treat you like a thug."

Ann Coulter carefully considers both sides of an issue:

“It is only when the victim is black that we must have a show trial…and the threat of riots.”

Wait. I just noticed all these leading lights of conservatism are white people. Surely Dr. Ben Carson, a newly minted Fox News conservative commentator, has an important and positive contribution from the African-American perspective:

“(T)here must be something we could learn from this situation in addition to not creating a big racial divide."

After years of dismissing global warming - or "climate change," the euphemism that seems acceptable to conservatives -

Fox News did the unthinkable last week. It actually reported on the consequences of human-created green house gases.

The science behind climate change, like the science behind the theory of evolution, is pretty much conclusive. Still, right wingers like to pretend there is some big debate raging in the scientific community over global warming.

There is no debate.

Some 97 percent of all scientific papers that take a stand on the issue agree global warming is happening and we're seeing more and more of it's effects around the world. Likewise, 97 percent of all climatologists agree global warming is caused by human activity.

Of course, the conservative media dolts in the pay of the carbon-producing industries run by people like the Koch brothers always like to point at record cold snaps in an attempt to discredit global warming, ignoring the fact that these weather events along with drought, wildfires and flooding are actually part of the growing problem as scientists predicted.

On Monday the high was 95 degrees in New York City and 73 degrees in Dallas, Texas, just one example of disrupted weather patterns scientists say is caused by global warming.

So it was astounding that Fox News cited the Department of Energy in a report that warned "power disruptions that were caused by Superstorm Sandy" will become more frequent as global warming worsens.

Maybe now that the preferred source of information for conservatives is finally getting around to acknowledging what most all right-minded thinkers have known for years Fox News will stop mocking the irrefutable science and start getting serious about learning what global warming is doing to the planet.

As if we didn’t already have enough gun violence in America, along comes Zombie Industries with a series of shooting targets, dummies made up to look like those who support gun safety laws, one of which is the president of the United States.

Everything wrong with the gun industry and its allies can be summed up in what Zombie Industries is selling.

We already know the gun industry and its front group, the National Rifle Association, are completely irresponsible, refusing to consider even modest proposals to curb gun violence including universal background checks, something the NRA supported a decade ago. Zombie Industries squares the circle.

So, for $89.95, you can buy “Al” a human torso dummy that resembles Al Sharpton. When shot, the life-size dummy “bleeds.”

The company offers a disclaimer saying the dummy “represents fictitious characters” then tells the dummy’s back story this way: “Poor Al he was a Sharp guy…”

Sharpton, an African-American ordained minister who hosts MSNBC’s popular “Politics Nation” has been an outspoken supporter for sensible gun safety laws. He called out Zombie Industries on his show after the company exhibited a dummy in the likeness of President Obama at the NRA’s national convention.

We haven’t had enough gun violence directed at presidents?

Another dummy target, presented as a “gun control lobbyist, the most dangerous zombie in the USA today,” no doubt thrilled the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.

This isn’t funny. This isn’t good clean fun. It represents the basest, most disgusting underbelly of America’s gun culture, appealing to the sick fantasies of some who would love to turn their weapons on anyone who knows gun safety legislation saves lives.

Progressives and conservatives agree America was founded on the principle of democratic self-government.

Opinions diverge at this point as to what precisely that means.

To the Founding Fathers and the other landed, white men they represented, it meant becoming a new aristocracy akin to the old one in England, where moneyed gentry protected by royalty lorded over the common folk.

When freedom was won, the new American aristocrats consolidated power. Women, minorities, the poor and others not part of the new “aristocratic” class were deliberately excluded.

“All men are created equal” meant just that: white men of wealth were equal. They modeled Congress on the Parliament in Britain, with the aristocracy in the upper chamber, and even considered at one point crowning George Washington king.

In the century and a quarter that followed, America’s faux aristocrats pretty much had free rein to do as they pleased and the results weren’t pretty.

This is where the self-government part comes in. We the people came to understand the guiding principles of our Declaration and Constitution, intentionally or not, applied to everyone, not just the wannabe aristocrats.

America is far different today than it was in 1787. Most notably, every American enjoys the same rights but we must vigilantly safeguard them. The self-interest of modern day aristocrats is almost always at odds with the rights of everyone else.

The old robber baron aristocrats believed they had the right to clear cut entire forests, dump their factory and mill waste into rivers, and let the smoke from their furnaces blacken the skies. How this harmed others didn’t matter.

It became necessary for we the people, exercising self-government, to correct this inequity with new laws and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce them. Not surprisingly, modern aristocrats want the EPA abolished.

Similarly, other aristocrats thought they had the right to put small children paid pennies to work in mines and factories for excruciatingly long hours. It never occurred to these self-interested white men that what they were doing was immoral.

The parents of those children likewise endured endless hours of toil in unsafe conditions at whatever pay the aristocrat decided he wanted to give them. Starvation was the alternative. This was exactly the way things were in England, after all.

We the people recognized the inequality and made laws curtailing these exploitative practices putting in place the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to enforce them. OSHA is nonetheless reviled by modern aristocrats.

A conservative MDJ writer suggested the other day that the EPA, OSHA and other federal agencies are ruled by despots ignoring the “letter and spirit of the Declaration and the Constitution” as if these agencies weren’t lawfully founded by the people to protect the rights of everyone; as if these agencies are not accountable to the people through Congress.

Change is inevitable. Change is constant. But I’m always amazed by educated people who fail to evolve their thinking and accept that change is a permanent part of our existence. The good old days, conservative types maintain, were the best days despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

These same conservatives consider anything new and different as evil and misguided. Look no further than their pathological hatred of the first African-American president as proof positive.

We the people have much to be grateful for. And what makes America great, what makes the American people great, thankfully, is the majority’s willingness to evolve despite the conservative minority always screaming “stop!”

"The good old days", if it were up to the GOP we would go back to a time when women, for example, could not vote and had no control over their bodies. Sounds almost like Texas and a number of other Red States.

I have often said, "Thomas Jefferson wrote those beautiful words, but in actuality Jefferson was a stone cold hypocrite".

This undated publicity photo released by HBO, shows actor James Gandolfini in his role as Tony Soprano, head of the New Jersey crime family portrayed in HBO's "The Sopranos." Funeral services for actor James Gandolfini are scheduled for Thursday, June 27, 2013, at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York City. Gandolfini died June 19, 2013 in Italy. He was 51. (AP Photo/HBO, Barry Wetcher, File)

As Tony Soprano, the amoral, overbearing New Jersey mob boss with issues, James Gandolfini demonstrated his enormous acting talent, ranging from ruthless killer to shivering bowl of emotional Jell-O, sometimes in one episode.

Tony could be a charming dining companion one minute and viciously beat some poor mook with a pool cue the next, his family of hit men, thieves and miscreants living in abject terror and undying love of their capo de capo.

"This is the man I'm going to hell for," muttered Christopher Moltisanti, played by Michael Imperiale, one of The Soprano's outstanding cast members.

Over the last decade, the New Jersey born and bred Jim Gandolfini enjoyed tremendous success on the stage and screen in addition to television. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his role in the Broadway comedy "God of Carnage" and played Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in last year's Oscar-nominated film, "Zero Dark Thirty."

So his death last week at age 51 while vacationing in Italy came as a shock, for Gandolfini seemed to be just hitting his stride.

One project that did not receive as much public notice as it should have was Gandolfini's documentary, "Alive Day Memories, Home From Iraq," in which the actor interviewed American servicemen and women wounded in battle about their injuries, their mental health and their hopes and dreams. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j08fvUk67U

Aired on HBO, "Alive Day" is a startling, sometimes shocking look at what our wounded warriors endured and what they are enduring as they re-enter civilian life. Some are missing limbs while others suffer post traumatic stress disorder. All of these young men and women volunteered to serve and deserve whatever it takes to help them assimilate and thrive in their post-war lives, which is the point of Gandolfini's film.

His friends and family remember Jim Gandolfini as a quiet, shy and generous man who, unlike a lot of stars, used his international celebrity for the greater good.

The right wing is simply amazed that the New York Times is bitterly condemning President Obama over the last week's domestic spying revelations. They have long assumed the Gray Lady was in bed with Obama, hiding or excusing his faults and inflating his achievements.

In expressing their wonderment, however, what conservatives actually reveal is their abject ignorance. It's another shining example of the epistemic closure I wrote about recently, in which right wingers live in their own information bubble stuffed with incorrect assumptions, falsehoods, distortions and lies.

They conclude that, because the Times isn't, say, Fox News, where virtually all coverage is tilted heavily to the right, it can't possibly be "objective".

I doubt few Cobb County conservatives bother reading the New York Times, so I can attest as a regular reader that Obama and his policies are routinely castigated or questioned by the Times' editorial and op-ed writers as well as in its White House coverage. Yet local conservatives are convinced - possibly because the newspaper is based in the Northeast - that the New York Times, one of the America's newspapers of record, is an unapologetic liberal rag that rolls over for Obama.

Realty check, please.

In the wake of 9-11, President Bush rushed to seize power, capitalizing on the fear and trepidation many of us felt after we watched the Twin Towers fall. The debate at the time, to the extent there was one at all, was that new, high tech tools were needed to fight international terrorism and we must unleash these against America's enemies.

We - you and me, friend - timidly allowed our elected representatives to ram through legislation like the Patriot Act that gives government busy bodies more, not less, power to intrude into our lives.

Now we're shocked these programs under Obama continue to cast a wide net, pulling in telephone and Internet communications records that can be used to zero in on, so we are told, suspicious traffic that could be terrorists...or might be just you or me chatting politics with friends, or visiting anti-government web sites, or reading about armed insurgencies.

Here's the thing: You allowed this to happen. So did I. As the comic strip character Pogo famously said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Do you want your security or do you want your freedom? Make up your mind.

@Nettie: Using Sandy Hook as an example of international terrorism is a colossal stretch. There was no communication between Adam Lanza with any outside entities in places like Pakistan involving the crime he committed. I don't believe it has be shown that Lanza spoke to anyone about his plans. If I am incorrect, I apologize in advance.

This sounds like another effort by you to put another controversy on President Obama's desk.

The war in Vietnam was nothing like today's war on terror. Comparing one to the other, as some observers have done, is absurd. The only thing the two have in common is that they were sold to the American public on fraudulent terms.

To his everlasting discredit, Lyndon Johnson ginned up the rationale for all out war in Vietnam with his bogus Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Realizing what he'd done not long afterwards, to his everlasting credit, Johnson refused to run for a second term.

George W. Bush didn't have Johnson's courage or capacity for shame, otherwise he too would have declined to run for a second term after his bald-faced WMD lie was exposed.

None of this has stopped right wing commentators, many of whom assiduously avoided military service, from pushing their "Obama is surrendering the war on terror" B.S. It should be noted that many of these are the same people who were dead wrong when they were screaming for a war with Iraq 10 years ago.

As Gen. George Patton said of the Saturday Evening Post's editors, "(They) don't know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about (sexual intercourse)."

Unlike Vietnam, there was no conscription during the war on terror. If we had a draft, there would have never been an unprovoked invasion of Iraq without irrefutable evidence that Saddam had WMD. And there would have been a lot of hard thinking before U.S. boots were put on the ground in Afghanistan, history's cesspool.

Bush, who turned down a Vietnam tour, would never permit his wealthy friends to send their sons or daughters to Iraq.

I guarantee you, the College Republicans and Bush's Skull and Bones at Yale would have been the first guys protesting in the streets in 2003 if they had actually been compelled to go fight and perhaps die in Baghdad or Kabul.

I was in high school during Vietnam. My recollection is that protesters like the ones at the University of Wisconsin didn't want to be forced to put their lives on the line in a pointless conflict with no exit strategy. Nevertheless, Richard Nixon escalated the war when he took office in 1968 even though, by then, anybody with a brain knew Vietnam was a lost cause.

With neocon and right wing media chicken hawks cheering him on, Bush's response to a horrifying terrorist attack was to unleash America's military might on a relatively small number of stateless terrorists holed up in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was like using an nuclear bomb to kill flies; no real thinking, no long range planning. Just blindly swinging massive fists and hoping to connect.

We accomplished almost nothing in Iraq and next to nothing in Afghanistan at a cost 7,000 dead Americans and at least $2 trillion. For the first time in American history, taxes were not raised to pay for either war. Rather, Bush put his wars on the national credit card.

God forbid the wealthy should be asked to sacrifice even one dollar of their precious earnings.

Meantime, until Obama had the guts to give the politically risky order to kill him, Osama bin Laden was giving the finger to America. Now bin Laden and scores of his lieutenants are burning in hell and al Qaeda is a shell of what it was in 2008.

President Obama is exactly right to call off the dogs of war. It was the wrong answer to the terrorism threat from the get-go. Investigations, surgical strikes, black ops, espionage and all the rest is how you take down vicious international thugs, not sending hundreds of thousands of American troops to Iraq or Afghanistan to "nation build."

(And to my usual critics: No, I didn't serve in uniform. The Vietnam war was over and the draft abolished by the time I graduated from high school. America went to an all-volunteer military and I chose not to enlist. I honor those who do serve and never, ever want to see our young servicemen and women committed to unnecessary wars where they are asked to risk their lives for the sake of some politician's "legacy" or a military contractor's profitability.)

Gov. Nathan Deal wants more minorities to vote Republican because he suddenly realized all those black and Hispanic kids in our public schools will be the majority of the Georgia electorate in one more generation.

So to attract these young African-Americans and Hispanics and their parents to the GOP’s big tent, Deal signed an order last week restricting the Common Core curriculum, not because it’s bad for education, but because its adoption was encouraged by the Obama administration.

It’s the same far right pandering Deal engaged in when he refused Medicaid expansion dollars. That decision cost the state jobs and revenue while ensuring your federal tax dollars pay for expanded Medicaid in blue states like New York without a nickel coming back to Georgia.

Sen. Chuck Schumer thanks you.

On the one hand, the GOP knows it will continue to lose elections without African-Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, Asians and other minority constituencies, not to mention women.

On the other hand, as noted by MDJ’s Don McKee, “One hurdle for Deal and other Georgia GOP leaders is the disaffected tea party and other conservatives like those who appeared at the state convention Friday to denounce ‘Republicans in name only.’”

See the problem for the party of stupid, as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal famously dubbed today’s GOP? They want it both ways.

We’ll let the radicals, the nativists, the religious right, the tin foil hat wearers, and the angry white men run the party - the same crowd that effectively destroyed the GOP’s 2012 presidential chances - but we’d sure like them black folks, Mexicans and ladies to vote for us!

Those RINOs the tea partiers detest are the same moderate Republicans who used to help conservatives win elections; you know, guys like Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

But with the far right wingers making noise disproportionate to their actual numbers – only 8 percent of conservatives self-identify as tea party according to Rasmussen – and Republican elected officials terrified of being “primaried” out of a job, the GOP leadership believes, falsely, that their party must accommodate extremism.

Those elusive minority votes won’t come until Republicans purge their ranks of the radical elements that are costing them elections.

Gov. Nathan Deal wants more minorities to vote Republican because he suddenly realized all those black and Hispanic kids in our public schools will be the majority of the Georgia electorate in one more generation.

So to attract these young African-Americans and Hispanics and their parents to the GOP’s big tent, Deal signed an order last week restricting the Common Core curriculum, not because it’s bad for education, but because its adoption was encouraged by the Obama administration.

It’s the same far right pandering Deal engaged in when he refused Medicaid expansion dollars. That decision cost the state jobs and revenue while ensuring your federal tax dollars pay for expanded Medicaid in blue states New York without a nickel coming back to Georgia.

Sen. Chuck Schumer thanks you.

On the one hand, the GOP knows it will continue to lose elections without African-Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, Asians and other minority constituencies, not to mention women.

On the other hand, as noted by MDJ’s Don McKee, “One hurdle for Deal and other Georgia GOP leaders is the disaffected tea party and other conservatives like those who appeared at the state convention Friday to denounce ‘Republicans in name only.’”

See the problem for the party of stupid, as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal famously dubbed today’s GOP? They want it both ways.

We’ll let the radicals, the nativists, the religious right, the tin foil hat wearers, and the angry white men run the party - the same crowd that effectively destroyed the GOP’s 2012 presidential chances - but we’d sure like them black folks, Mexicans and ladies to vote for us!

Those RINOs the tea partiers detest are the same moderate Republicans who used to help conservatives win elections; you know, guys like Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

But with the far right wingers making noise disproportionate to their actual numbers – only 8 percent of conservatives self-identify as tea party according to Rasmussen – and Republican elected officials terrified of being “primaried” out of a job, the GOP leadership believes, falsely, that their party must accommodate extremism.

Those elusive minority votes won’t come until Republicans purge their ranks of the radical elements that are costing them elections.

Republicans demand the president plug leaks that jeopardize national security.

When he does, Republicans condemn Obama’s “attack” on the First Amendment.

Just last year, Sen. John McCain was outraged over series of news stories that divulged classified information.

“A really disturbing aspect of this is that one could draw the conclusion from reading these articles that it is an attempt to further the president’s political ambitions for the sake of his re-election at the expense of our national security,” an indignant McCain declared.

An equally incensed Obama denied the senator’s politically-motivated charges when he said the leaks didn’t come from the White House. He then ordered the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor.

Fast forward to May, 2013. The Justice Department seized telephone records from the Associated Press with the goal of plugging the leaks McCain and other Republicans want plugged.

But what about the First Amendment?

We’re at war, remember? There are terrorists who want to kill Americans. The Homeland is threatened. Classified information that appears in the media aids terrorists. At least that’s what Republicans wanted us to believe in 2012.

“We’ve seen more leaks, absolutely,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers told Fox News last year. “This is an opportunity for the president to be bold, to take a stand...It is very clear that somebody who had access to...very senior covert action classified material was responsible for some of these leaks.”

So the administration took bold action. Whether it has the chilling effect many fear remains to be seen. But if it plugs leaks that protect even one American life, then the First Amendment must take a back seat to America’s wartime security as it did in World War II when government censorship of the media was common.

Evidently McCain and other GOP senators agree.

“I want to see the details -- what was their rationale, why did they do it -- before offering an opinion," said McCain of the seizure. "For me, to rush to a judgment without knowing all the facts is just not appropriate."

Interesting to note, George, that your questions have not been answered days later.

Biden and Obama did out SEAL six and the families of some members of that team did hold a news conference at the National Press Club that was heartbreaking. President Obama is hated by the teams. Right,, they must be racist....no, they just know that he's more sympathetic towards our enemies than to them. And the multiple scandals have teeth. Who will Obama throw under the bus next?

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